Social history and the populist moment: contesting the political terrain.

How ironic that a field of study originally conceived as "history . . . with the politics left out" has become the focus of heated political opposition and debate.(1) But it is not hard to understand why this happened. Control of the past - or more precisely, of interpretations of the past - is of central importance to a political movement that proposes to lead us back to that past. And as Peter Stearns suggests in his contribution to this collection, social history does in fact have a political content. Conservative criticisms to the contrary, that content is not primarily Marxist or socialist; rather, I would argue, it is a more populist vision, defined by social historians' strong sympathy with the non-elite groups whose stories we seek to tell. And in a second ironic twist, that vision is based on the very ideals and values of American democracy - freedom, liberty, equality, opportunity - the alleged absence of which in our work the conservatives so roundly decry. Social history treats those ideals and values, not as holy incantations handed down by mythic patriarchs, but rather as vital, living ideas around which popular movements have mobilized and struggled for their collective interests, and as the (usually implicit, sometimes explicit) standard against which the progress of our two-centuries-long experiment in democracy must be measured. This is an approach which is at best uncongenial, and at worst positively threatening, to conservative readings of the past and proposals for the future.

Social history in the United States originated in, and still devotes most of its attention to, the study of disfranchised groups: workers, slaves, women, immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities. Our research has made abundantly clear the difficult and often oppressive conditions which members of those groups faced during most of American history: their inequitable participation in the division of national wealth, and their exclusion from the full privileges of citizenship. It thus makes clear the multiple ways in which the central ideals and principles on which the Republic was built were compromised and violated for large portions - in most times and places, the majority - of American society.

One would think that this history would be of at least passing interest to those devoted to the founding principles of our Republic. If one values those principles and wants to see them realized, one wants to know, indeed needs to know, how they have fared historically, on the ground. And interestingly, the conservatives have made little effort to contest the truth or accuracy of social-historical findings. Rather, they argue, we are looking in the wrong places and studying the wrong things. We're not writing the kind of history they want. They prefer a pageant of American triumphalism, of American success and achievement. Not for them social history's relentless catalogue of struggle, conflict, disappointment - and of democratic achievements: emancipation, women's suffrage, universal public education, widespread upward mobility and the rise of a "mass middle class," to mention just a few of the topics addressed by our research.(2)

Could it be that it is the social historians who are the true conservatives, in the sense of conservators of the nation's past, and the conservatives who are the ahistorical revisionists, trampling roughshod over the historical record? Could it be that it is social historians who take more seriously the ideals of citizenship and democracy, recording both the violations and the achievements of those ideals? Why are conservatives so indifferent, indeed actively opposed, to preserving the memory of popular struggles to fulfill the promise of American democracy?

The answer to this last question may be found in the social, economic, and political conditions of the 1980s and 1990s. These have been years of immense stress in American society, caused by a sweeping process of economic restructuring, compounded by the confusions of the end of the Cold War. Previous restructurings of this magnitude have provoked a series of "populist moments" in the United States, as non-elite groups mobilized to defend themselves against economic and social disruption. There have been three such moments: the First Industrial Revolution of the 1820s and 1830s, the Second Industrial Revolution of the late 1800s, and the Great Depression of the 1930s.

We are now in a fourth such moment, as evidenced by the Perot movement, talk radio, citizen militias, Pat Robertson's theories of international Jewish banking conspiracies, and other even less savory manifestations. Both in the past and in the present, American populism is a conflicted and unstable political phenomenon, combining within it powerfully contradictory elements from the political Right and from the Left. Since the rise of Ronald Reagan, it has been the Right that has succeeded in harnessing the energies and anxieties of the current "populist moment" and riding them to power. But the possibility of a populist challenge from the Left can never be completely dismissed. During the Reagan years it was still possible to talk about the "trickle-down" effects of tax cuts and economic restructuring. By the mid-1990s, such talk rings hollow in the face of stagnant or declining real incomes, massive layoffs and decreasing job security, rising levels of poverty, and a redistribution of wealth that has made the United States the most economically unequal society in the industrialized world.(3)

It is the connection between left-wing populism and social history, I believe, that has made the latter such a lightning rod for the conservative movement. Its studies of non-elite groups struggling to defend themselves against exploitation and oppression, or to wrest from elite classes and state institutions an equitable share of power and wealth, trace striking and evocative parallels to the current moment. The studies offer concrete examples of popular mobilization; they also show how those mobilizations expressed themselves and their aspirations through the language and ideology of American liberal democracy.(4) That language and ideology were revolutionary in the 1780s; they are still so today.(5) Far more than socialism or Marxism, they resonate strongly with American audiences, and constitute a highly effective critique of the increasing social and economic inequality promoted by conservative policies, and those policies' antidemocratic character.

This is why it is so important to the resurgent Right to neutralize those ideals by muffling, and if possible terminating (the "end of history" indeed!), historical discussions of how they have fared in practice. Instead, American principles of democracy and equality must be removed to a detached, pristine realm of historical myth, where they can be invoked and glorified but never linked or applied to current conditions of daily life (such as, for example, the legalized corruption of an electoral system entirely dependent on private campaign contributions).

In their efforts to distract attention from and reduce opposition to the intensifying inequality of modem American society, the conservatives have exploited the traditional fault line in American populism between, on the one hand, native-born Euro-Americans, and, on the other, foreign-born immigrants and native-born non-whites. Though they loudly deny doing so, the conservatives have gotten tremendous political mileage from demonizing both the latter groups and blaming them for current social ills.(6) Social history's efforts to understand the historical trajectory of these and other non-elite groups, and to produce balanced, empathetic analyses of their roles in American history, are antithetical to this conservative tactic of divide-and-conquer. Small wonder, then, that they don't want the government or the society more generally to support what we do.

In the face of this conservative assault, what can be done to enable social history to continue, ideally with the benefit of as much public and private support as possible?

First and most obviously, historians will have to lobby their rulers and representatives, in the same way that any other interest group does. The AHA and other scholarly associations do a surprisingly effective job of this, given the weakness of the constituencies they represent. The currencies of American politics are campaign contributions and votes. We control very little of either. This is a serious deficiency.

Still, we do have other resources at our disposal. Letters to elected officials still count for something; and historians write for a living. When contacted by the AHA, the OAH, your union, your university, and asked to write, don't file the request away in the pile of things that never get done. Write!

Another resource we should be exploiting is the high level of public interest in the re-creation and exploration of human experience in the past - the stuff of which social history is made. It is true that our books seldom rocket to the top of the bestseller lists; but this reflects the shortcomings of scholarly writing styles rather than lack of interest in the subject matter. Well written social history sells.(7) The enormous popularity of Ken Bums's PBS series on the Civil War, largely a "bottom-up" portrayal of that historical experience, further evidences the appeal of social history. And as anyone who has ever visited Sturbridge Village during the summer can attest, social-historical museums and exhibits are a powerful draw.

In my own home city of Pittsburgh, local government, foundations, and individual donors recently pledged $36 million for the renovation of new quarters for the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, much of that space to house new exhibits and archival resources on the history of families and neighborhoods in the region. Those public and private funders recognized that social history has popular appeal. They also saw it as a public resource, and as a means of preserving and possibly reknitting an urban social fabric badly frayed by the social and economic transformations of the last twenty years. When this case was made to local and state officials, they accepted it. Such a case must be made at the national level as well; historians must work closely with public organizations or institutions that sponsor social-historical activities and make the successes of those activities known. Would it be too quixotic to collect signatures on petitions of support for social history at such places and events? People are interested in what we do; we must find ways to turn that interest to our advantage.

A third resource is the captive audiences from whom we make our living: our students. They will probably have only marginal impact on current debates over social history; but what about the future? The conservatives dislike social history in part because it is not the kind of history they grew up with. How do our students feel about the kind of history they are growing up with?

As with most disciplines and subfields, the teaching record of social history is mixed. Like the public more generally, students respond with interest and enthusiasm to well-conceived explorations of human experience in the past.(8) They have trouble, however, with the structural approaches, abstract generalizations, and lack of historical event which characterize much social history (this sentence, for example). Current debates within the discipline over how to teach more effectively, and how to integrate the insights of social history into "standard" history courses, will help, but only several years down the road. For now, let us keep in mind that we are teaching future voters, future teachers, future members of school boards, future elected officials. We want them to leave our courses with an expanded understanding of the past, and with an appreciation of what social history contributes to that understanding. We must strive always to do the best job with them that we possibly can.

A final resource, and to my mind the most important, is the political forces opposing the conservative Right. For a variety of reasons, those forces have fallen on hard times. At the same time, the Right has waxed strong, in large part because its members have behaved the way citizens in a democracy are supposed to. Conservative moments and organizations, especially those based in the "Christian Right," have been exemplary in mobilizing themselves and taking part in the political process, initially at the local level but increasingly at the state and federal level as well. The only way that Democrats, or even moderate Republicans (that beleaguered handful - will the last one to leave the party please turn out the lights?), can hope to return to power is to field equal levels of organization and activism.

Social history is a scholarly pursuit; most of us chose it because of our love of the process of learning, reading, and study. We have no taste for the interminable meetings, the (usually figurative, but sometimes literal) pushing and shoving of democratic politics (or, for that matter, of departmental politics!). But at the same time our work often carries within it a political message and is animated, as argued above, by a spirit of populism. There is always a need for citizens to be actively involved in the political process; in these fin-de-siecle years, with the Right on the march and the national social fabric unraveling before our very eyes, the need is greater than ever before.(9) The stakes are very high indeed, and go well beyond the termination of social history. Will women be compelled to have children against their will? Will those children be compelled to pray in school? Will America become a "Christian nation"? Will most of the black male population be consigned to prison?

The answers to these questions and others will be determined by politics, and by the level of our participation in politics. Join your party or your union; take part in a political campaign; go to a school board meeting; write to your Congressperson. In so doing, you will serve the discipline by strengthening the political forces which tend to support it. Even more importantly, you will also fulfill the civic obligations that constitute one of those core democratic values that the Right wishes to claim as its own but that in fact have been at the center of American social history since the founding of the Republic. Who should know that better than us?

Department of History Pittsburgh, PA 15260

ENDNOTES

1. G.M. Trevelyan, English Social History (London, 1942), p. vii.

2. On the "mass middle class" ("defined here as the portion of the inequality spectrum from roughly the 90th percentile to the 30th percentlie"), see Samuel Hays, "The Welfare State and Democratic Practice in the United States since the Second World War," in George Reid Andrews and Herrick Chapman, eds., The Social Construction of Democracy, 1870-1990 (London, 1995), pp. 267-90.

3. Edward N. Wolff, Top Heavy: A Study of the Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America (New York, 1995); Kevin Philips, The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath (New York, 1990).

4. See for example Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York, 1984); Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York, 1988); Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York, 1976); Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York, 1995). For an interesting Latin American parallel, see Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley, 1994).

5. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992); Gore Vidal, The Second American Revolution and Other Essays (1976-1982) (New York, 1982), and United States: Essays (1952-1992) (New York, 1993).

6. Most recently, see Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York, 1994); Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation: Common Sense about America's Immigration Disaster (New York, 1995).

7. See for example Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error (New York, 1978); Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death (New York, 1981); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York, 1990); Ramon A. Gutierrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford, 1991); John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York, 1994).

8. See for example "New Standards, New Looks: Despite Critics, Enlivening History," New York Times (April 5, 1995).

9. On the decline since 1960 of political and civic participation in the United States, see Robert D. Putnam, "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital," Journal of Democracy 6, 1 (1995): 65-78; Robert D. Putnam, "Social Capital and Democracy," Braudel Papers 9 (1995): 1-8.